All at sea

I have been reading a book which, if it had been a novel, would count as one of the most ingenious constructions, with the premise for a gripping plot, and layer upon layer of language and meaning. But it is a diary, a genuine account, day by day, of the last year in the life of Richard Madox, an Elizabethan fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, on a disastrous voyage that takes him via Sierra Leone to Brazil, where the manuscript breaks off because he dies. And the death leaves the plot up in the air.

A great wealth of literature lies just a little beyond our habitual scope because it lacks the self-sufficiency of the works we recognise without question. It asks us to supply just a little too much effort, or actually to bother to read an introduction or pay attention to some footnotes. Historians and specialists know such works well, and enjoy exclusive access to their pleasures. The average reader is unlikely to pick up a copy of An Elizabethan in 1582, edited with amazing scholarship and skill by Elizabeth Story Donno, and published by the Hakluyt Society in 1976. But there's no reason not to, and I found my copy cheaply on the internet.

If Madox's diary had been a novel, the author would have seen to it that the ingenious forms of encryption used to obscure the content would have been ways of enticing the reader to solve certain riddles, which would have been judiciously strewn around the text. But this is a genuine secret diary, which the author, a ship's chaplain, most emphatically does not want the commander of the flotilla, a certain Edward Fenton, to read.

At first, Madox writes in plain English. Next, he writes in a cipher. Then, as things get hot for him after a letter has been intercepted, he resorts to Latin and Greek. Within these Latin and Greek passages (which Donno translates), like a code within a code, he assigns names to the characters, as if they were part of a classical comedy. And his whole way of expressing himself changes. But by now he has been almost too successful at locking his meaning away - from the point of view of the modern reader, that is.

The practice of keeping a logbook or journal of a voyage goes back to the beginning of the age of exploration, and the practice of caution or even deceit in such journals is just as old: Columbus kept two logbooks of his famous voyage, one true one for his own reference, the other for the consumption of the rest of the crew, so they would not realise quite how far they had already travelled, and freak out.

Madox, a protégé of the Earl of Leicester, had volunteered to join an expedition to the Far East, originally supposed to be led by Martin Frobisher, with a view to building a trading station in the Spice Islands. The promoters of the enterprise were members of the Privy Council and the Muscovy Company. From the start, Madox had his suspicions about Fenton, which were in due course confirmed when he realised that the leader of the flotilla had an idea, instead of going all the way to the Spice Islands, of stopping at St Helena and making it his base for raids on Portuguese trading vessels. In other words, they were all to become pirates.

This appalled Madox, as it appalled his fellow chaplain in the flotilla, John Walker, whose diary also survives. If they turned to piracy, they would disgrace the church of God and their profession. And besides, there would be no way for them back into the society they had left. The trouble was, though, the longer the expedition went on, the more the whole project reeked of failure, and failure of a commercial kind would anyway mean disgrace.

One imagines a chaplain to have been rather a minor figure on a ship. In fact, the ships' articles placed emphasis on the reverence due to them, and punishment for any infractions of it. Serious trouble lay ahead, however, if the chaplains were to come into conflict with the commanding officer and to preach against him, as Francis Fletcher had preached against the behaviour of Sir Francis Drake at a crucial moment during the voyage of the Golden Hind. In retaliation for this, once the moment of danger had passed, Drake excommunicated Fletcher in front of the whole ship, ordered him on pain of death never to come before the mast again and made him wear on his arm the words "Francis Fletcher the Falsest Knave that Liveth". Disgrace could not be more systematic.

But disgrace of some sort awaited them anyway if they returned without any solid achievement. They had fetched up in Brazil. From here, their dizzying options would have been: to do what they had been told - go round the Cape of Good Hope (a long way from Brazil, but the Portuguese often took this route) and head for China; or to do what they had been expressly forbidden, and go through the Strait of Magellan and lay waste to the coast of Peru, the plunder and glory of which (some of them thought) Drake had wanted all for himself.

We may think of a fellow of All Souls as a rather worldly character, much given to the good life. And Madox comes across in exactly this way in the early pages of the diary. He is clearly fond of drinking and "clubbing" (he actually uses this word) with his friends, wassailing his way around Oxford. He collects jokes, which he solemnly records.

I get the impression (although Donno does not say this) that he had something of a sideline in espionage, and that his enemies on the voyage (which dispersed ineffectually after an encounter with the Spanish) would have thought twice about crossing him - a protégé of Leicester. But this may be the effect of having just read Charles Nicholl's admirable account of the murder of Christopher Marlowe, The Reckoning. Certainly he was keen to do the state some service and, as the crisis deepens, we can see that he wanted to do so, above all, as a man of principle.